


Beyond the Box

by Seaward



Series: What Started in a Box [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Sentinel
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-13
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:26:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seaward/pseuds/Seaward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rodney is removed from his Guide, John, and pretty much everything else, while John struggles to understand exactly what's wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the Box

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to The Guy for reading an early draft and helping with Zelenka's dialog. Thanks to Elayna for helping with a nearly final draft. Any remaining flaws are mine (or are intentional idiosyncrasies based on Czech).

Everything was dark, no light, not even light for Sentinel vision. Rodney was alone! **Alone! Alone! Alone!**

He could move his arms and legs but felt nothing. No surfaces, hard or soft, no currents, liquid or gas, resisted his movement. Like floating weightless in deep space, he felt and saw nothing, not even the cold he should feel, among other things, if he was outside of gravity and atmosphere.

John’s heartbeat was missing, and Rodney was so used to tracking it that he’d registered the absence before he’d thought it into words. The sense of being alone, so alone, started with missing John. Now Rodney extended his hearing, seeking any sound of movement, any heartbeat, any hum of machinery. There was nothing. If he focused on himself, he seemed to hear a heartbeat. Pulling his arms in, he seemed to feel them press against his sides. But it was unverified knowledge, like what his brain put into words or almost words after his senses gathered complex and indescribable input.

He sniffed and stuck out his tongue, just to be thorough, but there was no taste or smell. Trying to extend each sense, Rodney realized he couldn’t calibrate himself. That frightened him. He thought he’d opened up, reached out with all his senses at maximum, but picking up nothing threw him off. Everything felt wrong, detached. Much as he habitually thought of himself in terms of his brain and thinking, now Rodney was only a shadow of himself. It wasn’t just the loss of his senses, Sentinel or otherwise. Rodney was alone, and maybe that wouldn’t have mattered to him at some point in his life. It mattered now. More than he cared about the Nobel Prize, defeating the wraith, or staying alive; Rodney hated being alone. He hated being without John, and it was tearing him apart.

-

After collecting the rest of his lunch, John considered the desserts and started to reach for the lemon cake. His hand paused, seemingly of its own accord. He couldn’t touch lemon cake. He remembered liking lemon cake, but something he couldn’t place insisted lemon cake was very, very wrong.

John turned away, shaking his head. A mild headache had been nagging him all day—not enough that he’d mention it to anyone, but enough that he felt it when he shook his head.

Finding his usual seat with Ronon and Teyla, John sprawled his way into a chair. “What’s the news, team?”

“The cooks have been experimenting with the pakas beans we traded for last month. I believe they are in these meatballs, and seem not to change the flavor particularly.” Teyla cut a bite of meatball off with her fork as Ronon shoved half a piece of lemon cake into his mouth using his bare hands.

“How’s the lemon cake, big guy?”

Ronon shrugged, “Same.” He ate the other half, and John started in on his pasta and meatballs.

-

John woke, tangled in sheets, heart beating fast. It was as if he’d been touched all over, but the touch had been taken away. There was something more, but John didn’t know how to handle it. This wasn’t a way he ever dreamed, wasn’t a way he ever woke from dreams, wasn’t a way he ever felt.

Something inside him felt empty. He ground his teeth together and tried to let it go, tried to let go of something he’d never known and shouldn’t know how to miss. But he was just this side of tears and relieved there was no one to see his pain. Of course, in a room this dark, no one could have seen his expression; except, John knew someone could. A Sentinel could see in a room where John wouldn’t perceive any light. A Sentinel could touch someone and adjust the pressure or speed of touch as he heard the heartbeat quicken or smelled the arousal of his partner. A Sentinel as a lover could increase his own sense of touch, making himself more responsive as two bodies brushed or rubbed against each other.

John let his hand press against his own hardening cock as he imagined a lover who could wink suggestively at him during a dull meeting and know from across the room when John’s body responded. John stroked himself imagining an ankle tangling his under the table at lunch or a warm shoulder pressing his as they leaned against the rail on one of the many balconies of Atlantis. A touch that might mean almost nothing to others could communicate more than enough if a Sentinel captured every response and opened himself to everything he wanted from his Guide. The pace of John’s hand quickened and he strained against the tangle of sheets imagining how he’d feel as a Guide thrusting into his Sentinel, knowing that the Sentinel could open his senses fully to the pleasure because his Guide was there to ground him, to know what he needed, to hold his focus and soothe him afterward.

John came in a mess across his stomach and sheets, pumping and pumping, then shaking and tangled. He drifted after, feeling undone in a way he never had from his own hand and rarely even with someone else. Where had he picked up erotic fantasies about Guides and Sentinels? He knew the terms, but they were rare. He’d never met any, and most of what he’d just imagined didn’t fit with what he thought he knew.

John rolled away from the mess, pulled a blanket up over his head, and let himself fall back asleep.

-

The next day in the lunch line John saw someone else hesitate when reaching for lemon cake. It was one of the scientists, Zelenka, and even though he took the cake in the end, the hesitation and the way Zelenka looked at his own hand as if he didn’t understand was too familiar to John. He took a slice of vanilla cake for himself and went to where Zelenka sat.

“This seat taken?” John asked.

The scientist looked up from beneath fly-away, uncombed hair and said, “No, Colonel, you want to join me?”

John nodded and tried to slouch into the opposite seat as if it was no big deal. He’d never eaten with Zelenka before, never had that much reason to interact with him, except when the city or the puddle jumpers ran into trouble. The scientists in Atlantis fixed things, and for whatever was wrong, it seemed this man might be able to fix it. The challenge was, John didn’t know how to explain the problem or even if there was truly something wrong.

“So what have you been working on lately?” John asked.

Zelenka removed his glasses and wiped them on his shirt, clearly uncertain as to what John wanted. Then he shrugged and said, “We’ve been adjusting the recycling programs to reduce city energy consumption, searching through Ancient database for other hints about increasing power supplies, or more ZPM finding.”

“Anything to do with virtual realities or alternate universes?”

The Czech scientist bunched up his eyebrows and squinted, as if John were a tricky bit of notation that might resolve itself with closer inspection. “Not that I know of. That’s really more Carter’s field than mine.”

“Do you know why you hesitated before taking the lemon cake?”

Zelenka’s eyes widened, and he shook his head. “I have no any idea. Why do you ask?”

“Because I did the same thing yesterday. It seemed like something was wrong.”

“With lemon cake?” Zelenka eyed his piece suspiciously.

“No, I don’t know. Something seems off, but that probably sounds ridiculous to a scientist.” John was expecting a rapid fire rant or snarky satire, but Zelenka just shrugged.

“I know not so much about VR or multiverse. But I heard stories that you figured out when you were in VR created by mist creatures, and given some of what I’ve seen in Ancient database, I withhold my judgment and will keep my eyes open, yes?”

John had been prepared to counter a brush off with “Whatever you say, doc” or “Really, I thought it was just rocket science,” but instead he could only say, “Thanks.”

-

In the shower that night, John thought the soap smelled funny. Then he decided everything smelled too strong and too much like chemicals. It smelled wrong.

John rinsed his face and breathed in through his nose. The barely there scent of the steam seemed right. As he ran fingers through his hair to rinse out the last suds, he imagined someone else’s broader fingers circling with just the right pressure to relieve his lingering headache. Those fingers would scratch gently at the nape of his neck, nails always blunt and neat. A Sentinel wouldn’t be able to stand rough nails that snagged, either for himself or for his lover. A Sentinel in the shower would smell like clean skin with a barely there glycerin soap, maybe with a hint of aloe. His warm chest would press against John’s back as his hands circled through John’s chest hair and teased his nipples. John felt himself getting hard again as he imagined the other man’s cock pressing against his butt.

Even if John had risked sex with men perhaps too many times early in his military career, he’d never been in a shower with one. The vivid sense memory of chest and cock (and Sentinel fingernails?) confused him, and his erection started to fade. A sense of being cared for and caring back faded with it and left John feeling drained and empty, which was crazy because he’d never felt like that with anyone before. How could he miss what he’d never had?

The bizarre thought about Sentinel fingernails lingered after John was dry and dressed for bed, so he looked up Air Force handbook information and basic first aid offered in the military database they’d brought from Earth. What he found confirmed that Sentinels could be irritated by personal care and cleaning products that didn’t bother most people. However, the articles all made Sentinels sound fragile, like they couldn’t do anything without a Guide watching over them, and as if most of them weren’t very bright or creative on their own. John had to wonder if there might be so few Sentinels identified because any that were at all intelligent would hide what they could do rather than be branded, discriminated against, and forced to work with a Guide or not work at all. Then he wondered why he suddenly cared and how he came up with such opinions.

-

The next morning Carter summoned John to her office, and John was surprised to find Zelenka already there. John leaned in the doorway, stalling for time as his brain switched tracks, and asked, “Did I miss a meeting?”

“Have a seat, Sheppard. We just finished a science department meeting, and Doctor Zelenka stayed to ask me about multiverse theory. Naturally, when I heard you’d asked him, I thought I should find out why.”

John sat a bit less casually than usual and wondered what he should say. It sounded like Colonel Carter was asking mostly as Head of Science and not as the Expedition Commander, but either way, if there was something wrong, John needed to help find out. The problem was, he still had nothing resembling proof, certainly nothing that would convince science types.

Carter smiled and said, “Zelenka already explained that both of you felt a momentary aversion to lemon cake. Can you tell me what other irregularities led you from cake to multiverse theory?”

Trying to place what a military commander should and shouldn’t say, and incidentally not embarrass himself too much, John offered, “The fact that I thought of ‘multiverse theory’ might count as an irregularity, since other than a couple of dubious stories, I know almost nothing about it. I’ve also thought about Sentinels a couple times in as many days, when I know next to nothing about them. And I thought my soap and shampoo smelled wrong, too.” John stared at the far wall trying to look like he was still thinking, but then smirked and said, “That’s about it. I’ve got nothing. How ‘bout you?”

Carter stared at him and Zelenka took his glasses off to clean them. John didn’t like it at all.

“I’ll tell you what,” Carter said. “Zelenka and I can rig up a test to see if you might have come from an alternate universe, but in the meantime, you visit Dr. Heightmeyer to see if you ping on any of the Sentinel tests.”

“What? I didn’t come from an alternate universe.” He shook his head as if he could shake off the notion. “If I had, wouldn’t I remember different things rather than thinking of uncommon words and having slight food and soap biases? And, please, there’s no way I need to see Heightmeyer. I’d know if I was a Sentinel, and anyway, don’t they do all that testing in school?”

“You’re the one asking about multiverses. You could have experienced some memory loss of disorientation if you swapped places with a version of yourself from a very similar, perhaps an incredibly similar, parallel universe.”

John looked to Zelenka, as if for some reason he thought the man might help. “She’s the only one who’s dealt with alternate universes before. We should be glad she’s willing to help at all, no?”

-

That afternoon John was summoned to an out of the way lab to meet with Carter and Zelenka again. After an hour that morning with Heightmeyer that had only made his headache worse, he wished he’d never noticed whatever it was he’d noticed.

“You don’t look so good,” Carter said.

“Thanks, I try.”

“Learn anything from Heightmeyer?”

“For once, yes,” John conceded with a smirk.

Carter rolled her eyes at him.

He continued, “Definitely not a Sentinel, but I could have been a Guide.”

“So that’s a change from how our universe was before.”

John raised one eyebrow and considered. “Heightmeyer says the tests for Guides miss a lot, because it’s not as critical as identifying Sentinels. I’m afraid I never did test well in school.”

Carter tapped her finger on the table a few times, then appearing to discard some further comment, she glanced at her computer. “While you were gone, we rigged up a quantum detector that should be able to identify the quantum signature from a parallel universe. We based it on some ZPM power research at Area 51 being led by Dr. Jeannie McKay, but she’s not currently cleared for Atlantis. So we’ll see where this goes and then decide if it’s worth trying for clearance to consult her or share our findings.”

“Colonel Sheppard, here, just sit.” Zelenka pointed John to a stool. “This should be quick. Nothing you have to do.”

“Plays to my strengths,” John said as he sat. The stool had a life signs detector pointing at it from one side and something that looked disturbingly like a ray gun on the other side. Both were at about head height, but John tried not to believe they made his headache worse. Zelenka typed something into his computer and the possible ray gun let out a series of clicks.

“Let me guess, it didn’t work.” John said.

“It’s working fine,” Carter replied without looking up. “Just give us a minute.”

An hour later, John was still sitting on the same stool listening to Carter and Zelenka argue about results from their detector.

Carter said for the third or fourth time, “There could be an entropic cascade effect.”

“Is that something to do with exotic particles?” John asked.

They both ignored him.

Zelenka pointed with one hand, typed with another, and said to Carter, “You asserted that only happened when there were two of someone in the same universe, and then only sometimes. He’s one person from two parallel universes that are very nearly in sync. What do we know?”

“We can’t know how to interpret these readings. He could have been farther out of sync before. The two universes could be combining or switching places.” Carter started typing.

“Hey,” Sheppard said, “Can I get up now?”

“No,” both scientists replied without looking his way.

John’s butt was getting sore, and not in a good way. His headache worsened by the minute. “Look, Zelenka reacted to the lemon cake, too. Why don’t you scan him for a while?”

A determined stare (from Carter) and a low grumble (from the Czech, in Czech) led to John getting a chance to stretch his legs. It turned out Zelenka also detected as combining two universes.

Then Zelenka and John teamed up to force Carter in as a control.

“That’s interesting,” Zelenka said. “She shows both patterns too, but not as strongly as I do, and neither of us as strongly as you. Perhaps we need a better control, or a larger sample.”

Over the next hour they put two marines, two scientists, and Teyla and Ronon through the device. After they’d all left, Carter combed both hands through her hair and said, “I don’t understand it. Teyla and Ronon show the double reading as strongly as you, Zelenka. The other scientists show less than any of us, and the marines least of all. How does that make sense?”

“What if someone was taken out of our reality?” John asked. “Then people could be affected based on how well they knew him or maybe how close they were standing when he disappeared?”

“That might explain the strength of different readings, but why would everyone read as if they’re from two parallel universes?” Carter asked.

“Ne!” Zelenka said, then frantically began to type.

“What is it?” Carter asked.

Sheppard went to look over Zelenka’s shoulder. It just felt right to him.

Zelenka was doing something in the Ancient database. Most of his screen was filled with writing in Ancient, which John couldn’t read at all, but whatever Zelenka was looking at also included a lot of pictures. They all showed Ancient devices, and John found them fascinating in a love/hate/don’t mess with my universe sort of way.

Finally, Zelenka settled on one device and said, “This. Looks like ugly black vase that twists through itself. The Ancient name translates as ‘remover’ or ‘un-maker’ and this,” he pointed at a paragraph in Ancient, “warns about possibly collapsing multiple waveforms or some such, maybe they mean parallel universes.”

Carter spent a long time trying to read the page, shaking her head, and then asked, “Seriously? Do we have one of these?”

“Not yet, but it’s listed with other items we found in a storeroom near the infirmary, so we could try there.”

“You don’t remember this device or anyone looking for it in the other universe, do you?” Carter asked.

It took John a while to realize she was asking him. “I don’t remember another universe at all. Do you?”

“Don’t you see,” Zelenka said. “If the machine deleted someone from a parallel universe, no one would remember that person or anything that person did. If that universe is collapsing onto ours, that suggests we’re almost exactly like them but without missing person’s influence.”

John closed his mouth when he realized he had nothing to say to Zelenka’s explanation. Strange as it sounded, it felt right.

“Furthermore,” Zelenka said, “Once the two universes stabilize as one, we might not be able to fix it, to separate them. So if we want to try, we should start looking for this device now.”

“Should we even try? What about the risks?” Carter asked.

John stood up straighter than he had all day. “Someone’s been removed. We can’t just leave him behind.”

Carter didn’t look convinced, but Zelenka suggested, “Besides, you’re the one who was worried about the risk of entropic cascade failure if we do no anything. We haven’t learned enough yet to know which is more dangerous course.”

“Fine, go look where you think best.” Carter waved them out, already focusing back on the computer. “I’m not sure we have much time left,” she muttered.

Zelenka followed John into a transporter as he punched the location nearest the infirmary. Then he caught John off guard by saying, “We might guess that you noticed the missing person most because in the other universe he is a Sentinel and you are his Guide. But when you say ‘him,’ do you know? Or is this just what you use for either the way you speak?”

John shook his head as they left the transporter and Zelenka led the way to the storage room. Once inside, they both searched shelves for the twisted black vase shape that Zelenka had identified. John’s natural inclination was to ignore Zelenka’s question; he couldn’t remember conversing with the scientist before yesterday. However, it felt wrong to ignore him, and John found himself explaining, “I don’t know how much is guessing or how much I know. But I don’t think he was like other Sentinels, or at least what our database says about them. I think he was a scientist and probably worked with you a lot, and if he was sensitive to lemons or something, that might explain both of us pulling back from the lemon cake. Being a scientist would also explain why the other two scientists were more out of sync than the marines you tested and why he might have been working with a device like the one we’re looking for. What I can’t explain is why Teyla and Ronon are so out of sync. Do you think we send scientists out with gate teams in the other universe?”

Zelenka, buried deep behind a shelf, laughed at that. “No, scientists would never want to take risks like that, and imagine the lost lab time. Maybe he needed to go with you because you were his Guide.”

John was going to protest that Zelenka’s explanation felt wrong to him, but that was when Zelenka called, “Found it!”

He stood holding his prize like a trophy in front of him, but when John reached out to touch it, Zelenka pulled back. “No, you must keep your super gene away from this until we have time to test it.”

“I don’t think we have time for tests,” John said. His head was pounding, and the device Zelenka held was practically calling to him.

“You could make yourself removed. We don’t know how it works.”

“Ancient devices work better for me than for almost anyone. I’ll try not to do anything to endanger others, but I want to take the risk. If I get removed, I might end up with him at least, and I know I can’t leave him behind.”

Zelenka’s eyes grew wide behind his glasses. “Somehow, I think you’re right.” He handed John the Ancient remover device.

John held the base in his right hand and thought “on” until his head stopped hurting and he thought “that seems right.” He lifted his other hand to slide along the side, and with a “click, click, click” the remover turned itself off.

John handed it back to Zelenka, who looked disappointed and said, “It didn’t work?”

John smiled, “I think it did.” His headache was completely gone. “Let’s go back to that rig you and Carter set up. I bet we all test as firmly in just one universe now.”

As he followed Zelenka back to the transporter, John felt his smile fade. Even if everything felt right, even if some other John was back in a parallel universe with his Sentinel whom he couldn’t leave behind, that left this John in this universe. He’d be the first to say his life had turned out better than he’d ever expected. He had Atlantis and the puddle jumpers, after all. Still, he couldn’t help wondering if there was someone out there, a Sentinel or someone else, who might belong with John so much that it would feel wrong to be in a universe without him.

-

With a “click, click, click” the remover turned itself off, and now it was in Rodney’s hands. Rodney was there in the storage room with John and Zelenka. His eyes grew wide, and then his knees began to crumple. John pressed up against Rodney’s side and threw an arm around his waist to keep him steady.

Rodney closed his eyes and thrust the remover toward Zelenka saying, “Take this away, Zelenka. Don’t let John or anyone with the gene touch it. Lock it up and put a large sign on it saying it’s very, very dangerous. Then I’ll tell you all about it—tomorrow.”

Zelenka took the device saying, “How do you think we got you back? John used the remover in a parallel universe, and he fixed whatever it was you mistook. Now you should go explain to Colonel Carter and probably sit in the quantum detector we made while you were off removing yourself.”

Rodney had kept his eyes tightly shut throughout Zelenka’s rant, and one hand had clenched into a fist in John’s shirt. “No, Sam will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m going to my room, and I’m not coming out, even if the wraith attack.” Then he sighed, “Okay, you can call me if the wraith attack, but nothing less. And I’m taking my Guide with me, so you can debrief to Carter on your own to your heart’s content.”

“But we don’t know what you did!” Zelenka protested.

“Go, now. If I feel very generous I might email you my notes from before that device—” Rodney waved his free hand around blindly as if even he couldn’t express the contempt he felt for the remover at the moment.

Radek took the hint and left.

John gathered Rodney closer, adding a hand behind his neck as well as the arm still around his waist. He pressed the fronts of their bodies together from legs to necks, and held tight for a couple of minutes.

As Rodney’s muscles and breathing calmed against him, John asked, “What do you need?”

“I need to be alone with you in my room, but I’d rather not open my eyes or deal with anyone else on the way there. Where are we?”

“A storage room near the infirmary. Are you sure you don’t need a doctor? You’ve been gone for nearly three days.”

“The time involved is pretty subjective. My senses are a mess. I need my room.”

“Okay.” The Guide part of John reacted without any protest. He led Rodney through the corridors the way he would a sick or injured teammate. Rodney kept his head down, making it less obvious that his eyes were completely closed. He kept an arm over John’s shoulders while John kept an arm across his back, and no one asked any questions.

Just inside Rodney’s door they paused, and Rodney took a deep breath. Either his eyes slit open or he knew exactly where his laptop was, because he grabbed it before he pulled them both to sitting on the bed.

“What are you doing?” John asked, as Rodney opened the computer and flew through log in pages and files.

“Let me send this to Zelenka.”

“You don’t need to do that now,” John said.

“I should, and I can, very fast.”

Sure enough, Rodney added a few sentences in a file, typed a few more in a message to Zelenka, and the computer was off and set aside. Then Rodney sat, deflated, so unlike himself. His eyes were completely closed again.

“When did you last eat?” John asked.

“Where I was, I’m not sure the time question applies.”

John reached into the nightstand where he knew Rodney kept a stash of power bars. He opened one and put it in Rodney’s hand. “Will you be okay while I get some water?”

Rodney nodded. He devoured the power bar in the short time it took John to return with water. John slid behind Rodney and sat with his legs on either side, pulling Rodney up against his chest before giving him the water.

Rodney drank, and then he spoke, slowly for him and without moving his hands at all. “Whatever happened was pretty much all my fault. I thought the device was safe to study because what it did would require so much power it would either need a ZPM or have to pull it from another universe. My theory now is that it generates power by removing a person and collapsing two universes. I don’t know if the Ancients planned to harvest the extra power somehow or if it was some kind of weapon to destroy alternate universes. I just know that the power generated by removing me was used up when I came back, and not even I am egotistical enough to risk further research on something like that.”

John leaned his head on Rodney’s shoulder. “Where were you?”

Rodney’s shoulder tensed, and he wrapped his arms on top of John’s arms, where they already embraced him. “I was nowhere. I don’t even know how I could perceive my own body, but there was nothing else I could sense. I tried sensing as far as I could, and there was nothing to even calibrate against. So I didn’t zone, but I was lost anyway. I wanted it to stop with every moment, but I couldn’t give up on you, even when there was no time. It could have been forever.”

John didn’t know what to do. He felt himself rocking, like a small child or someone holding one. He buried his head in Rodney’s neck but couldn’t do much else as Rodney held his arms and was still in a way that was the antithesis of Rodney.

Finally, Rodney unclenched and said, “Clothes off and lie down.”

It caught John off guard, and while the bossy tone was typical Rodney, John wasn’t sure if his Sentinel knew what he needed now. Without letting go he said, “I want to take care of you.”

“I know, and you will, but I need to do this first. Take off your clothes.”

John took his clothes off. It wasn’t playful or erotic the way it usually was. The room was the same temperature as always, but John felt chilled. Rodney insisted on removing his own clothes by himself, and he kept his eyes closed the entire time. He lowered the lights in the room, which surprised John until he realized Rodney could probably still see more than enough light through his eyelids.

Without another word, John lay down on his back on the bed. Rodney came and lay on his side, tucked up against John and resting his head on John’s shoulder. John reached over to hold him, but Rodney said, “If you could just lie there and tell me what happened—I know it’s a lot of talking for you, but I want to know everything you experienced, and I think I can recalibrate my senses if you just lie still and keep talking.”

It wasn’t comfortable, lying there exposed and not moving while talking, but John was determined to do it anyway. He let himself close his eyes and said, “I didn’t know anything was wrong until I reached for a piece of lemon cake…”

-

Rodney could feel the tension in John’s body from where he lay along John’s side. He could hear John’s too fast heartbeat and knew he was asking a lot of his Guide, asking him to talk and lie still. He also knew John wouldn’t begrudge him this, especially if he knew how much everything had hurt since Rodney returned. It wasn’t that his senses were overextended, more like they were out of control. Something beeping in the control center had panicked him like a klaxon, while he’d completely missed any infirmary sounds that might have told him where the storage room he’d returned to was located. Everything was turned inside out, and Rodney had never felt so betrayed by his own body and senses before.

As John told his story about lemon cake in an alternate universe, Rodney forced one part of his attention to take in every word, every inflection, every pause. John’s military CO’s might have been surprised that John could give such a complete and comprehensive debrief, and Rodney appreciated that John would offer him nothing less.

Rodney focused another part of his attention to adjust his hearing without interfering with the part listening to John’s story. Rodney was used to multi-tasking, and it was soothing to hear John’s heartbeat, calming a bit already, then to stretch farther and farther across Atlantis to find each individual heartbeat, as if he were a life signs detector. Rodney felt his protective instincts kick in, knowing that all the people and systems of Atlantis, his Atlantis, were as they belonged. He could have tuned in on Zelenka’s argument with Carter, but that might have distracted from John’s telling of his story, and Rodney wanted to take that all in. So he brought his hearing back to just his room.

By the time Rodney was ready to open his eyes and reclaim his vision, John was talking about a dream, and his face flushed as he earnestly tried to explain. “And he, well I, was confused because he’d never been thoroughly touched all over, and I didn’t remember, but I knew the feeling. I ended up jerking off in bed thinking about the way you’d wink at me and get me half hard during staff meetings. And I knew as a Sentinel you could tell from across the room, or that you could see me in a dark bedroom. But I couldn’t picture you, and I didn’t think I’d ever known a Sentinel.”

As John went on talking about touches of ankles and shoulders that he hadn’t been able to remember but had vividly imagined, Rodney realized the story could have been arousing, but neither he nor John were reacting that way. Rodney let his eyes trace up and down John’s body, so familiar that he knew every freckle and crease. He hadn’t planned to touch, but then John said he’d felt undone after jerking off to his unremembered imaginings. He admitted to pulling a blanket over his head, and Rodney had to reach an arm and leg across to hold John, to comfort him like a blanket, even if Rodney wasn’t quite ready for that himself.

John pressed into the touch without seeming to move. Then he continued to tell about cake and Zelenka, and how John didn’t remember ever having spoken with Zelenka there before. Rodney tuned his sight to the light and dark side of a single strand of John’s hair in the dim room, and then he felt secure in tuning his sight to baseline.

By the time John talked about soap, Rodney was ready to sort out smell. He’d already been aware that John had been using different soap and deodorant. Now he focused on and sorted each smell, and the smells of John’s body, which were still the same underneath it all.

He licked John’s collar bone, and knew John would understand exactly what he was doing. Still he couldn’t help but recall the first time, when he’d licked John without meaning to—a time trapped in a box that had led to so many other firsts.

Rodney tasted the air, and knew he was back where he needed to be. His body and his senses were familiar enough that he could focus on touch and John. But he didn’t want to rush, and he still needed to hear John’s entire story. He ran his hands gently along John’s torso and held himself back from interrupting until John told about Sam mentioning research done by Jeannie McKay at Area 51.

“How did she end up there?”

John startled as if he hadn’t thought Rodney was truly listening. “Maybe in a universe without you, Jeannie did some of what you did here.”

“Do you think I was never born or that I died?”

“Rodney, can I move yet?”

“Just a little, if you need to. I’m still normalizing touch, and I need to hear your entire story.”

“Ugh,” John grunted and pulled Rodney into a goofy hug while his far hand mussed Rodney’s hair a little too roughly. “I don’t want to think about why you weren’t in their universe. It makes me feel sorry for the me that wasn’t really me, but I’ve just been him for two-and-a-half days. I don’t know how he’ll remember it, but he wanted the things he couldn’t remember having, and if there’s no you, then maybe it would have been better if he’d never known.”

“Maybe there’s someone else for him?”

“There isn’t, Rodney.”

Rodney lifted his hand to John’s face and traced from his temple to his jaw. His fingertips ran farther, through scratchy stubble and down to the thin skin above John’s collar bone. He didn’t want to imagine an alternate Rodney without John either.

“Finish the story for me?”

John settled back down, on his back, letting Rodney stroke him like a cat. Rodney tuned his sense of touch in and out and tried not to get sidetracked by his favorite places, but John’s openness, his willingness to talk and lie still for Rodney was stirring something deep. Rodney loved John in ways he’d never expected.

Now John was explaining how his feeling of wrongness in a universe without Rodney had led to Zelenka and Sam building some sort of quantum detection rig, Zelenka leading them to the remover device in a parallel universe, and a John who couldn’t even remember Rodney’s name risking everything to bring him back. By the time John finished his story, Rodney was stroking up and down John’s thigh, and they were both half hard and ready to move on.

“My turn?” John asked.

“If you want.” The words were still coming out of Rodney’s mouth as John rolled them over so John was pressed on top of Rodney and they were kissing.

“I want to be in you, now. Do you need more time?”

“Now is good,” Rodney gasped between kisses. He felt John reach for the lube in the nightstand, and then two fingers pressed inside, still chilled with lube, but Rodney was ready. He relaxed into his lover’s touch. John knew just where to go to make him gasp. Then John was lining up and pushing in. For just a moment Rodney had to reign in his senses, and then everything was right and he wanted John to stay there forever.

John either knew or wanted the same thing. He kept it slow, working in and out of Rodney’s body. Rodney ran his hand across John’s chest, reveling in the spring of each hair and watching John shudder when he brushed a nipple.

“I never want to lose you,” John said.

“I know. We can’t waste this.”

Rodney felt his body quiver around John. Then they were both pushing against each other, speeding up. John wrapped his hand around Rodney’s cock and every nerve cell in Rodney’s body seemed to fire. The feeling went on and on, and then he could feel John coming, too, and it was almost as if he felt both body’s reactions until they were exhausted and lay next to each other panting.

The warmth of John beside him and familiar sheets beneath him, the smell that was John and sex and just a trace of the ocean, and the barely heard movements of all the people who were part of his Atlantis filled Rodney with a solid and almost sentimental surety of his place in the universe. He gazed at John who’d passed from completely blissed out to an honest, semi-amused smile that kept Rodney from being too full of himself. “So would you say you were drawn back to me out of Guide-ly-ness or for the sex?”

John rubbed his face into the pillow and said, “Lemon cake, Rodney. It was all about the lemon cake.”


End file.
